Abstract:

The Free Software Movement is one aspect of the centuries-long
struggle for freedom of speech and the freedom of ideas. Like other
aspects of that historic struggle it is joined to the related movement
for social and economic redistribution. In this talk I consider the
Free Software Movement in its historical context, and present my view
of the issues that presently face us in relation to the larger history
of our struggle.

Volker Grassmück: It is a great pleasure to introduce the first
speaker, who will give you the opening keynote, it is Eben Moglen, who
is a professor for law and history of law at Columbia Law School. He
is also a Board Member of the Free Software Foundation and the long
standing General Counsel to the Free Software Foundation, very active
in enforcing and in keeping the GNU General Public License the
wonderful tool that it is.

Please welcome Eben Moglen.

[Applause]

Eben Moglen: Thank you. Thank you to Volker and to all of his
colleagues for making this event possible for all of us. [Volker
Grassmück passes Eben Moglen a glass of water.] Ah, it's good, thank
you. That's perfect.

Die Gedanken sind frei: it's a very old phrase from the 12th century,
you can find it in a Minne song in the 13th century. At the beginning
of the 19th it again became a popular song, which many of you have
heard and some of us have sung. As reflective of a certain moment in
the history of the west as Beethoven's third symphony, whose
contemporary it approximately is.

The phrase travels down the European historical tradition as part of a
struggle in which we too are engaged. The struggle for freedom of
thought is as old as European politics and it underlies who all of us
are today. It exists in relation to a long-standing struggle against
various forms of control of thought each characteristic of the
political and economic moment in which they temporarily triumphed.
Whether it is the control of education and publication by the
universal catholic church, the control of printing and censorship of
learning by state power or the control of knowledge and culture by
owners, capitalistically motivated and ideologically inclined--we
have been struggling against power for the freedom of thought for a
millenium.

The struggle for freedom of thought, which is universally admired,
though not always actually supported, goes along with a much less
universally admired struggle for economic justice and the equality of
persons. "Die Gedanken sind frei:" what's its contemporary little
phrase or verse? Well, I would nominate one: "When Adam delved and
Eve span, who was then the gentleman?", the phrase attributed to John
Ball, the leader of the peasants' revolt in England in 1381.

We have associated the struggle for human equality with the struggle
for freedom of knowledge and we have associated them rightly: they
belong together. Because the recognition of individual possibility,
to allow each to be what she and he can be, rests inherently upon the
availability of knowledge; the perpetuation of ignorance is the
beginning of slavery. So we are part then of two struggles, whether
we like it or not. A struggle for the freedom of thought and a
struggle for justice to persons. That the ownership of culture, the
commoditization of learning, poses a danger to a movement for equality
and economic justice is obvious to all. This is, as Thomas Krueger
just pointed out, I think, very eloquently, an inherent part of the
problem of globalization, whose sunny side we are. For globalization
otherwise means the impoverishment of workers through remorseless
competition between the rich and poor parts of humanity. A struggle
conducted for the benefit of the shareholders, that is the few,
through limitations of knowledge available to the many. Accordingly,
we meet the 21th century not as the inventors of something new, but as
the latest generation struggling for ideals that are very old.

What differentiates us from those who have struggeled in the past, as
Volker just identified for you, is a change from utopianism to
practicality. From the moment at which that movement for freedom of
thought and economic--or at least political--equality began to gain
momentum in the middle of the 18th century, those struggeling for
freedom where condemned to utopianism. The ideals of the American and
French revolutions which brought what there was of freedom of thought
and equality of persons into being at the end of the 18th century
necessarily rested upon hopes, upon dreams and beliefs about what
might be possible under conditions of tumultuous and unprecedented
transformation.

The constitution of the United States, as one of its greatest
interpreters has pointed out, is an experiment. To Justice Holmes and
to all those lawyers and judges who over 200 years struggled to turn
that experiment into practical reality much is due. But we must also
recognize, as photographs from Iraq have shown this year, that it
remains in substantial part a dream subject to political disruption by
those operating under the control of power.

Utopianism has also the heavy drawback that the struggle to perfect a
world never before experienced often turns violent as dreams confront
unexpected realities and the dreamer has little choice but to lash out
against the tyranny of fact. And so the struggle for freedom of
thought and the struggle for economic equality has been substantially
limited in prior generations by the inevitable reliance upon a dream
of a perfect future never experienced before. And it is not
insignificant that in all the European languages the phrase--the
word--used to designate that perfection, "Utopia", means "nowhere".
For it is, after all, a struggle to achieve what has never been
achieved. A struggle to bring about conditions that would allow human
beings to be what they have never been: new socialist man; the perfect
citizen of the perfect republic. These were noble dreams, and the
struggle to achieve them, even at its worst, has a nobility to which
we aspire. But we are fortunate because ours is a movement built not
on dreams but on actualities. Ours is an ideology of change which
depends not on what might be but on what already is.

Practical revolution, the friends and colleagues with whom I have been
working for the past 20 years have shown, practical revolution is
based upon two things: proof of concept and running code. That is to
say: do it first and allow the implications of what has been done to
settle in. Technology, unlike the Hegelian or Marxian flow of
history, technology itself is irreversible. That which we have is
ours--not a dream--it belongs to us: it runs; we use it.

Having brought into being the tools of our liberation, it is now our
privilege to use them to change the world around us. This is our
special role in the long history of the struggle for freedom of
thought. The conditions which brought about this unusual situation, a
revolution based not on dreams about what might be but on recognition
of the full implications of what is: this situation we owe to the
industrial capitalism of the 20th century. It will--it must--go
down in history as having adroitly worked its own destruction.

The tools that we gained from the system of industrial ownership of
information thrown up by the 20th century, those tools are the tools
by which we undo unfreedom and return our communities, our loves, our
friends, ourselves to the condition of liberation for which we have
all and for which our ancestors too long hoped. The technology of the
20th century makes our liberation possible, because the technology of
the 20th century turns solidity into digital air. "All that was
solid," it was said, "would melt." And so it did.

The 20th century knew information as physical artifacts, stuff, that
costs money to make, move and sell. More than at any moment in the
prior history of human beings, die Gedanken sind nicht frei, by
necessity because the stuff had costs. Thomas Edison made it possible
for music, which had been for the whole history of human beings an act
of communion, a thing inherently shared, that music turned into a
product, an object, a commodity. And from the commoditization of art
grew the belief that art could be owned. Which made sense even when
art was bumps on a thin piece of tin foil in a plastic disc. But art
has returned to the formlessness from which it came. It has returned
to being what it was throughout the history of human beings until
Edison: it has returned being something that must be shared to exist.

The technology of the late 20th century reversed the conditions of
power that made it. This is not the first time that that system of
social production called capitalism has had that effect. When I wrote
a little thing called "The dotCommunist Manifesto" some while ago, I
was doing it in order to show that a form of social analysis
characteristic of those searching for freedom in the 19th century
might bear some recognition in the 21st. Not as a matter of normative
political analysis but as a comment on the actualities of the day.
The struggle of Burgeoise technology towards ever greater functioning
such that it undermines its own conditions of existance was an
observation made by shrewd onlookers a hundred and fourty years ago,
and we live in the fullfillment of its truth. Ownership struggled to
reduce its costs, to hold down the costs of making the commodity, in
order to free itself to greater profit. And in the end, as was so
shrewdly noted in the 1860s: "All that was solid melted into air, and
air was something that we all knew we could freely breath."

And so we found ourselves confronting a system of power based upon
ideas of property relations that the technology of the owners was
already making obsolete. It is not possible for industrial
organizations to do a better job of distributing music than 12
year-olds can do. Hence the world in which the music industry
confronts the children on the barricades, attempts to jail them, fine
them, control them, and loses. The same is true for all the other
forms of art given to us by the 20th century and being freed by the
very technology that the controllers of artists hoped would control
art even further. This, like the adoption of movable type printing at
the end of the 15th century, constitutes a moment at which the powers
of control have adopted technology which transforms their conditions
of existance, will they, nil they. They do not will it but it happens
to them anyway. And the technology that they have freed, like the
sorcerer's apprentice, finds itself overwhelmed by its own
implications.

The free software movement, with which I have had some slight
association, the free software movement is the beginning of the
recognition of the implications of the technology. A recognition
based not on the idea, "I could write better software if I could share
it with other people," but rather, as Mr. Stallman made clear from the
beginning, a political recognition: Freedom is a good in itself.
Inhibiting sharing, prohibiting people from teaching what they know to
others, and from learning what they want to know themselves is wrong.
The free software movement was not a technology movement; it was the
face of the struggle for freedom of thought in technological guise.
It took advantage of technological reality to bring about a deeper
scrutiny of political possibilities. And we are here today because
those political possibilities have sunk in.

There is not a government on earth any longer which fails to
comprehend the social possibilities of the freedom of software as a
development strategy for an economy, as an education strategy for a
population, as a reassertion of the public's right to get what it
pays for, in the public servants, whom it employs to think and devise
and to improve the infrastructure of social life. There is not an
enterprise on earth in the technology industries which fails to
recognize the enormous constructive power of unleashed creativity in
individual people. This very week, an organization, SUN Microsystems,
which has shown in the past a belief that great software could be made
in secret behind closed doors, has decided to reconsider that
proposition with respect to the most important software asset that it
possesses. There is not a culture business on earth which is unaware
of the competition in which its distribution arm now finds itself with
freedom as its most dire competitor.

Once upon a time that this was a political movement for freedom was a
secret. I knew it. Stallman knew it. You knew it. It's not a
secret anymore. Everybody knows it now. What we are struggeling for
is clear. There are days of course upon which we prefer not to say it
too loudly. We are engaged in negotiations, quiet please. We are
respectable today. We are wearing suit. But we have not forgotten
what we meant to do. We meant to make freedom and we are making it.

This puts us--happily in my case, I hope happily in yours--in
contention with power. Some of that power is the power of monopoly.
It is Mr. Gates and his billions. Some of it is contention with
habit. It takes a lot of trouble to get people to change the word
processing program that they use. [Applause] Some of it is contention
over principle: is it free when it is "freedom from", or is it free
when it is "freedom to?" Which words should we use? We struggle with
one another as the movement for freedom of thought always does. We
are divided internally over phraseology. We sing slightly different
versions of the same song to slightly different music. And it's
dissonant and it jars us. The contention is good. The struggle for
freedom of thought is a struggle. It has, I regret to say, even
casualties. Though the good news for us is that there will be no
guillotines, no blood in the streets, no commune, and no suppression
of the commune. Because freed of the burden of utopian assumptions,
liberated from the need to dream of what has never been, we are able
to pursue our struggle relentlessly and remorselessly on the basis of
what there already is today and what we with our own hands can make
out of it tomorrow: proof of concept plus running code equals
revolution.

The network society, which has restored our sense of primary contact,
unintermediated, not through Mr. Murdock, not by way of Mr. Gates, but
directly with one another. By chat, by e-mail, by video exchange, by
file sharing, we are connected to ourselves. That network society
recapitulates contentions among classes, communities and groups,
traditional in all society. But it recapitulates those contentions in
a new form, precisely because we are allowed to share. We are not
struggling for primacy in the market. We are not struggling over
which class will possess the means of production. We know where the
means of production are: they are inside our own heads. We are
struggling to come into ourselves. We need not take anything away
from anybody else. There will be losers. The losers are those who
have proposed to own what we have made but we are not required to do
more than to exist as creators and to share our works.

In December of 1989, when some very positive events had happened in
Prague, I went down into the New York City subway one day and I found
a man down there who plays the violin for money in the subway at his
usual place. And in the back of his violin case, where he collected
the dimes and the quarters, he had put a photograph of Vatslav Havel
and underneath he had written: "Artists will rule." That's us, and he
is right. It's a struggle; it has winners and losers; it is a velvet
revolution; it is the fullfillment of long hopes and the deepest of
dreams, and we are fortunate to carry it to fruition this time.

The network makes it possible for us. What we have done is what we
build on. But we have to keep it safe. We require four things: Free
software, free hardware, free culture and free spectrum. I mean by
those four things to set before you the pillars of the revolution we
have already made, as well as those things that we must build further
on.

Free software, it needs hardly any definition. It means to create
technology which everyone can change, everyone can improve and
everyone can share. We've done it.

Free hardware is essentially a conservative cry. It means: keep the
military occupation out of the net. Keep the hardware from obeying
Mr. Eisner rather than the person who bought it. Make sure that
hardware responds to the people to whom it belongs not to the people
who send bitstreams through it. The war for free hardware will be
sharp, short and inevitably successful, but we have to fight it.
There are forces in our societies which believe that only if every
single electronic device is under their control is their business
model safe. They are correct. [Applause] Left to their own devices,
they would recast the network in that mold to protect their
businesses. But they are not going to be left to their own devices.
We have the devices and they belong to us. So our goal is to conserve
that property of the network, that it is made of things that we have
bought, we have installed, we possess, and that respond to our demands
not the demands of some third party who has got a movie temporarily
moving through them. We will win that fight and we will have little
to show for it beyond what we already have. Nonetheless we have to do
it.

Free culture, to my dear colleague Prof. Lessig, who has trademarked
the phrase, I owe an analysis so deep and so comprehensive that there
is little left to say. We must have the ability to make our various
arts collaboratively out of what we have already done by adding
imagination untaxed to what already is. This is a promise for an
acceleration of education throughout the globe. Billions of minds
hungering for knowledge and for beauty, to whom everything can now be
given. In a world where everything is a bitstream, where the marginal
cost of culture is zero, where once one person has something,
everything can be given to everybody at the same costs that it was
given to its first possessor, it is immoral to exclude people from
knowledge and from beauty. That is the great moral problem that the
20th century has be bequeathed to the 21st. We can eradicate
ignorance at the expense of a few. We have to do it. We cannot
permit the voluntary starvation of most of the minds on the planet.
We have a duty; we have a joy; we are bringing to our colleagues, the
human race, everything we know and everything we love; there is no
higher pleasure than delivering what we love to those with whom we
wish to share it, there is also no deeper moral obligation.

[Applause]

Free hardware and free software are two thirds of the platform for
free culture but without bandwidth, boxes sit dumb. We must recapture
for everyone the common property of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Every legal system at its bottom agrees that the spectrum is common
that it belongs to all, and every legal system denies as practical
reality what it proposes as principle. Every system continues to
maintain that government must control how spectrum is used. Sometimes
quite explicitely for the purpose of remaining itself in power;
sometimes in a claim of some civilizing mission on the belief that
government and only government can really artfully determine who ought
to speak to the masses in the interest of the expansion of knowledge;
and sometimes, as in my society, out of sheer venality: "We, the
politicans, have taken bribes from you, the media owners, and we will
faithfully reflect the interests of our masters, who have put us in."
But whatever the reason may be, whether venality or lust for power or
a misguided belief in the superiority of government wisdom about who
should speak to many, spectrum allocation is an evil whose time has
come.

[Applause]

This is far more complicated than the problems that we have solved in
freeing software. More complicated than the problem that we face in
keeping hardware free. Far more complicated than the problem of
inducing 12-year-olds to share music and help free culture. But it is
not beyond our power on the basis of what we already have. We need
dream no utopian dreams to achieve bandwidth for all on equal terms.
We possess already working code and proof of concept: it is called
WiFi. It is the attempt to use a small, not particularly desirable
piece of spectrum, to model the possibility of self-organized,
non-hierarchical, decentralized, equal-measure access to
electromagnetic spectrum and we are showing what the alternative
actually is. Those of us here who work on this issue are able to show
to populations all around the globe the "telephone bill"-less future.
The place where nobody pays to talk to anybody else by the zip, by the
minute, by the tick, by the impulse, anymore. We can build that thick
mesh that embraces all of us and add at communal expense the long-haul
communications portions which tie that mesh together, and we can offer
people equality of communication. Mr. Murdock will be disappointed.
Deutsche Telekom will be heart-broken. Tough.

Because what is at stake is exactly that moment at which we make
learning open. Like the recognition that science itself can be based
only upon print that is within the reach of every scientist. In the
very same way that western science depended in the 16th century on the
movement for freedom of thought--what more noble proposition could we
take for our movement than the simple words "epursi muove" with which
Galileo pointed to the intrinsic relationship between freedom of
thought and scientific progress--in the same way that the scientific
revolution in the west first depended upon free information exchange,
so now. In the next generation we will confront once again the
recognition that without a movement for freedom of thought science is
tied to ownership. Does anybody who inspects the current
pharmaceutical industry or the forthcoming genetic revolution doubt
me? Without the free exchange of ideas, science is the servant of
inequality. And it is science, the ability to know, the ability to
teach, the opportunity to learn everything that any human mind can
reason out: it is science which is still at the root of the
development of our societies.

So the movement for free spectrum, like the movement for unlicensed
printing, is a movement to put beneath science the power of all the
available human minds. Like the war against censorship in western
Europe, the war for free spectrum is a war for the freedom of ideas in
its most valuable sense: the ideas that changed society extend life,
make human existance better. We have grown so accustomed to the idea
that the power to communicate with one another is something we have to
buy from someone else that we are in danger of forgetting just how
much rests over the long history of human beings on the inherent
virtue of untrammeled communication.

So out of those parts, free software, free hardware, free culture and
free spectrum, we build a society of justice, of equality, of liberty.
Not in the belief that if we somehow force the aristocrats out, later
society will become perfect; not out of the belief that there is some
class needing liquidation, and then we imagine human beings can
change; not a dream about nowhere, but an attempt to move what we have
within our appartments, within our work places, within our schools,
out into the larger world where it can begin to fulfill its perfectly
legitimate, necessary, inevitable work of liberation.

We have turned the freedom of ideas into an instrument of social
change. We have become what all our ancestors have dreamed of
becoming. People who can take what is and make it the method of
liberation. We have been singing it for a thousand of years:

Die Gedanken sind frei
My thoughts freely flower
I think as I please
And this gives me power
No scholar can map them
No hunter can trap them
No man can deny
Die Gedanken sind frei

In a network that circles the globe, built of freedom and responsible
to no master, humanity will at last be able to hear itself think.
This is what we have dreamed for; this is what we have built for; this
is what we have desiged; this is what we have coded; this is what we
have licensed; this is what is out there in use already.

We live amids the tools of our own dream, and this rich, shining
moment is the moment were we take them up and turn them deliberately
in the struggle for freedom which we have long hoped to prevail in.
This is another great moment in the long history of the search for
liberation and the difference is this time we win. Freedom, now!

Thank you very much.

[Applause]

Volker Grassmück: Thank you very much Eben Moglen. And I would
assume he is ready to take questions, comments as well, of course...

Eben Moglen: There should be at least some objections... ah, if you,
yes, sorry.

Audience Member: Hello, my name is Daniel Pisano, I come from
Darmstadt. I would like to point out that while we have a chance to
win the war, there already is a new battle going on with TCPA, for
instance, which is trying to control the hardware and the way that we
compute and the way that we communicate, in the end, by cloaking it,
with the excuse of making computing more secure. Which is not
something new, we've seen it before also in politics and in warfare,
even in the current days of our lives. My question is, how many
battles will we have to endure until actually we will win the war, as
you say, or as you have predicted? This is my first of three
questions, and I will wait for the answer before asking the other two.

Eben Moglen: Trusted computing is one important aspect of the
struggle for free hardware, right, that was what I meant to speak
about. It is correct that there are, at any rate at the moment, for
the moment, lots of manufacturers of hardware who see a possible
advantage to them in the construction of hardware controlled not by
the human being but by the bitstream that runs through it. You are
right that security is one aspect of the claim made in support of such
hardware; privacy, the control of personal data from inappropriate use
is yet another; and of course the protection of the content
manufacturers against distribution competition is the unspoken third.

My own personal belief, as somebody who works intimately on this
subject all the time, is that the enthusiasm among the manufacturers
for the construction of unfree hardware is not very durable. It is
subject to consumer pressure: we are the consumers. It is our
pressure which will determine what they try to make.

The free software movement will take some steps in the next few years
to discourage the use of trusted computing hardware. Not, I hope, by
sealing off the free software world from all examples of trusted
hardware. That would go too far and give ground back, if you like, to
the non-free side which would then have all the unfree hardware in the
world to play inside. We will engage in a creative, occasionally
ironic dialogue with unfree hardware. We will show that unfree
hardware can be made free. And we will discourage the manufacturer of
unfree hardware by helping consumers to choose freedom over slavery,
wherever possible.

How many battles will there be? It remains to be seen. If we are not
the last generation struggling about this, that won't be a terrible
surprise. My point was: we have all been here for a very long time;
we'll be here for a while longer.

What I think we can do is to use tools that are already in our
possession and that dwarf anything that was ever possible before,
self-consciously, determinedly, in favor of freedom. If we know
that's what we are doing, if we are aware that we are running a
rebellion here, we'll be are all-right. It's if we lose our way and
forget what we are ultimately struggeling for, that we are in danger.

As long as you know, and I know, and everybody here knows, that we
must have free hardware, we will have it. As long as we identify it
as a tool of freedom; as long as we make clear to everyone we know
that liberty depends upon it, we'll be all-right. But that's a
teaching job we have to do.

I see this less as a struggle with the IBM corporation or the Hewlett
Packard corporation or the Dell corporation as a struggle against
ignorance. Less about: Can we make free hardware? Can we convince
the hardware manufacturers to give up on "trusted computing?" Which
my colleague Mr. Stallman rightly calls treacherous computing.
"Trusted computing" it means: computers you can't trust. Right?

It is less about: can we make manufacturers do what we want? Than
about whether we can make consumers demand what they need. When we
have educated people, that particular problem will be a lot easier.

Did you want to follow up?

Daniel Pesano: Well, follow up question number three was already
answered by, given the answer, by your mentioning of the education
being the most important point in getting people, raising people's
awareness about the problems they are heading right into.

Second question is more like a comment--half a comment--about the
free telephone that you, or the free communication among the people
that you mentioned.

I don't think that Deutsche Telekom or the MCI (do these still exist?)
or any other communication company will lose in this game because they
are already, well, you have flatrates for DSL and for broadband access
and they already have understood that voice over IP will be the future
and they are switching their telephone systems and their marketing
strategies into that direction and they will be all placed in their
business very well waiting for the people to pay the bills not for the
minute but for the volume. So I don't think that will be a problem
for them.

Eben Moglen: It is true that up until now we have dealt with
unshrewd opposition. The Microsoft monopoly was not smart in its
Bdealings with free software. More stupid than the recording industry
it would be difficult to get. The telecoms companies have, I agree
with you, a better strategy. They can pursue the task of convincing
you that wireless access is something you should pay for; and they
will have pretty good luck in doing so for a while.

Star Bucks Coffee, which I regret to see is also in Berlin, so I can
speak about it as a thing in the neighborhood. Star Bucks Coffee,
which has honeycombed the United States has a deal with T-Mobile: you
can pay six dollars a day or thirty dollars a month and you can have
wireless service in Star Bucks. So I built a little experiment, a
piece of performance art in Manhatten Island, I found people who lived
within a hundred meters of Star Bucks and I gave them wireless routers
and got them high-speed service from a supplier who didn't care if
they reused it and I put a costless hot spot inside the Star Bucks
that way. So you walk into my liberated Star Bucks, and it just works
if I'm not violating anybodies trademark in using that phrase.

So the problem for the telecoms companies is: they have very high
costs for construction and we can build more cheaply than they can.
This is the fundamental difficulty in their model. I grant you that
their model is smarter than the recording industry model: they have
not yet decided that the way to deal with this is to put children in
jail. But we can make them go that way, you understand, by building
over them and that's what we gonna do.

And then they will face, ultimately, the same problem that is now
faced by the dead distribution businesses: how much coercion can they
get the state to apply in support of their business model? The
liberalization movement of the 1980s and 90s consisted of the state
saying: "We want to do less coercion on behalf of the telecoms giants
than we did before." Pretty soon, the telecoms giants will be
demanding the reintegration with the state, as the recording industry
fundamentally is now demanding integration with the state in order to
protect itself. It is a better game for them to play, but they will
lose it anyway. Renting switching equipment is not a good business in
a world where switching equipment is ubiquitous. And if we use the
spectrum which belongs to us and leave them to use the copper wires
and coaxial cables: we win.

Daniel Pisano: Thank you.

Volker Grassmück: The next question, please.

Eben Moglen: No, let's take the other mike.

Volker Grassmück: Is there, oh, sorry, I didn't see you... is the
microphone...?

Eben Moglen: You are audible to me, so you are audible to everybody
else I think.

Volker Grassmück: No, please, please use the, can, can this
microphone be opened please? On the... thank you.

Eben Moglen: You have to use the microphone.

Audience Member:] [inaudible that the main issue here is education
on how important freedom is in order to win the free hardware war.
However, when we're fighting this war, when we are educating people,
we are actually competing with media which is not exactly keen to get
this message through and with their minions in government--I'm from
Argentina, and I must apologize here for our government who recently
suggested WIPO to create an agreement that would practically prohibit
computers, because it would make it illegal to possess any kind of
device that would be able to aid in the decryption of an encrypted
stream or something like that, and so--when we must educate the
general people who actually inform themselves through the channels of
the enemy, it kinda makes it an uphill battle, doesn't it?

Eben Moglen: Well, let's reach into the history of the struggle for
freedom of thought to think about that. The moment where we might
want to is in the place we think of it now historically as religious
reformation. Those who had dissenting views concerning the doctrine
and orthodoxy of the one indivisible holy roman catholic church at the
opening of the 16th century found themselves pretty much in the same
place. And their answer was pretty much the answer we must come to
which is that contact between individuals--personal contact, word of
mouth--is fundamentally the best way to teach anybody anything.

It is for this reason that Lutheran and Calvinist theology made such
an enormous point about the importance of hearing the preaching of the
word, because to be in personal contact with the sound waves emitted
by human beings is the best way to convert a system of orthodoxy to a
new idea.

The power of the electronic media is undeniable. The world of the
20th century was a world in which it was proven that radio could cause
mass-murder. But that does not mean that the power of one person to
one person has vanished in any way at all.

I grant you the feeling of sadness at being an Argentine, you have to
sympathize with my feeling as a citizen of the American empire,
[Applause] but it's an interesting neighborhood, yours, isn't it. The
Argentines are often disturbed to find that the Brazilians are their
neighbors. It's going to be a strange place in the next ten years as
word of mouth percolates back and forth, maybe through Uruguay, on the
subject of what it is that we can have.

Remember that the fundamental problem of the revolutionary ideology is
to explain to people what is possible and the great defect of the
struggle for freedom heretofore has been that explaining to people
what is possible meant pointing at Utopia, at no place, at a place
that never was.

It will now be possible for us to point at things that are. Very soon
there will be enough municipalities around the world where free
municipal wireless networks exist; where everybody is connected all
the time to everybody else, that it will be possible to say to people:
"Why don't you want that?" and point around the corner.

It is true of course that Mr. Murdock will not be pointing with you.
But people will listen to you. You are the Apostle of a new faith and
it is a faith whose miracles can be seen in front of people. They can
be proven; they can be tested, they can be tried. When you have that
going for you, you have much. If you retain your own faith in the
ability to get that message across, you will succeed.

Volker Grassmück: We have time for one more question. If you could
be brief, please.

Audience Member: I'd like to first say that freedom is like a
pyramid: it's about trying to upseat the few at the top with the many
at the bottom. I come from Africa and I think that we can divide
freedom into political, economic and then, finally, intellectual
freedom. I believe you are talking about intellectual freedom.
Africa only received this political freedom within the last half
century.

Now, if we take the strugggle for freedom that you are considering and
speaking about, which is removing the bonds of the few to the many, I
think that the logical progression is going to be that the western
hegemony over the world is going to change. I think the west is no
longer going to rule the world and I want to know whether that is
feasible or whether you believe that can happen. For example, nobody
would ever dream of invading or bombing the smallest and weakest
nation in Europe today: but we have Iraq.

So, I just want to pose this as a question for thought to find out
whether freedom is real or it's only for a few people.

Eben Moglen: All questions of this kind depend upon an assessment of
the time scale, right?

I have said here in the arrogance of wealth and in the comfort of my
own life in the west that this is the generation in which at last we
win. You are right in saying, "Maybe here, maybe for you." But what
is changing, as you rightly suggest, is a fundamental shift in the
global spaces of power.

Ask this question: at the moment when I began my talk in the 13th
century, were the Europeans in charge of the world? No, not even
close. A backwater. A place of low culture and low civilization as
seen from a high civilization place take, for example, Baghdad.

What one might have said was that certain technologies, particularly
the technologies of maritime commerce and naval armament, put
Europeans in control of the world for five hundred years. We are now
in the decay of that power. What comes next is what happens when
human minds around the globe are liberated under conditions of
equality. It will take generations to build that network out so that
it embraces every human being who is here. But the process, once it
begins, is hard to stop or reverse, as the march towards European
domination of the world was hard to stop and to reverse for half a
thousand years.

We, this generation, can achieve something which will change the
long-term balance of power on the globe. We can't do more than that,
but if we do that, we have done a good day's work and can go to rest,
satisfied.

Eben Moglen is professor of law
at Columbia University Law School. He has served without fee as
General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation since 1993.
He is the founder of the Software Freedom Law Center,
softwarefreedom.org. You can read
more of his writing at moglen.law.columbia.edu.